Today's rising popularity of the Internet has encouraged many companies to do business over the Internet. Most Internet transactions are conducted through ubiquitous web-browsers and web-servers using the hyper-text-transfer protocol (HTTP), which is the technical foundation that the World Wide Web (WWW) is built on. Security and privacy concerns have led to the encryption of many transactions between the web browsers (clients) and the computers of the web-sites (servers). These encrypted transactions are often of a financial nature, such as ordering items with a credit card, checking account balances, etc.
Common encryption methods in use today are resource-intensive. Many network packets are exchanged between the two communication end-points to establish a secure session. The encryption and decryption algorithms used are processor-intensive for both client and server computers. Although the performance drop on a single client machine might not be noticeable, servers that handle many simultaneous connections can suffer a significant performance degradation, perhaps even becoming unavailable at high load levels.